“Keep Your Name”

Dave Longstreth refuses to be pinned down. His music is constantly shifting and expanding, the scope of his work heightening with his band, Dirty Projectors. Since releasing their most gripping record, Swing Lo Magellan, and its companion EP, About to Die, in 2012, Longstreth has kept busy with other projects, producing a record for the Tuareg guitarist Bombino (Azel), composing a classical work for an ensemble, and performing compositions by the Hungarian pianist Bela Bartok with a quartet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For other musicians, such work might hint at a direction, or at least a headspace. But attempting to use these events as context clues for the next Dirty Projectors record is a fruitless exercise. True to form, it’s fitting that the group's first new song in four years is just a modification of an old one.

The lo-fi “Keep Your Name” is a solo about detaching from another person, constructed atop a warped loop of Swing Lo’s “Impregnable Question.” “We don’t see eye to eye,” it chimes. That fragment aligns with the song’s central theme: that here, in this love, there is no longer room for compromise. Read literally, “Keep Your Name” uses the language of divorce, keeping one’s name as an indicator of estrangement or disunion. “What we imagined and what we became/ We'll keep ‘em separate and you keep your name,” Longstreth croons. Things unfold in slow motion as his voice lags. The song forgoes the colorful baroque pop of Bitte Orca or the experimental chamber music of Swing Lo Magellan for something far more animatronic, pitched down and glitchy.

As with many Dirty Projectors songs, the anchor is still Longstreth’s tone; the sedated refrain locks into the pitched-up “Impregnable Question” sample, overlapping and creating contrast. Hollow and isolated drums, grand piano chords, and static clicks stagger into a full gallop, a swath of plainspoken vocals holding to the foreground but changing frequencies. “There is a place that we both know/ It lives in our hearts, we built it together,” he sings sweetly. It's an anti-ballad and a tantalizing hint of what's to come.